To The Letter
by Grav
Summary: The whole first year after James's death, Declan feels like he is being haunted.  Part IV of Helen Does the Time Warp, Again.


**AN**: Best thing about Sanctuary stories? Writing them out of order. This fits in with the rest of Long Road Home, Begin Again and Enter Athene.

**Spoilers**: Into the Black

**Disclaimer**: Not mine, donate to S4K

**Rating**: Teen

**Characters**/**Pairing**: Declan Macrae, James Watson, implied Declan/James

**Summary**: The whole first year after James's death, Declan feels like he is being haunted.

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><p><strong>To The Letter<strong>

The whole first year after James's death, Declan feels like he is being haunted. He finds notes everywhere, letters from beyond. It's not that James doesn't trust him, it's just that he's insufferably meddlesome, and wants things run his way even after he's died. Declan discovers instructions written in James's clear hand tucked into every corner of the lab, observations written in a cramped, but no less efficient script, lacing the margins of the scientific journals in the library, and a whole series of coded notes it takes him four months to decrypt in the wine cellar, during which time some sort of alarm mechanism prevents anyone from entering the room at all (and traps the resident _muris pulchrum_so that the staff have to feed the poor creatures by throwing bread and cheese through the laser grid).

After a while, the volume of letters peters out, and Declan has to admit it makes him a bit sad, like even the pieces James left behind are leaving him. Still, he finds something new every other week or so as he reorganzies and archives and digitizes more than a century's worth of records. Occasionally, he finds things James wrote that are not work related at all, involving neither creatures nor medicine nor murder. Some he feels guilty for having read, as they are clearly meant to be private, but there are more than a few he thinks James might have written to him, even if they were never sent. It's the ones intended for Ashley that truly break his heart, though, and Declan hasn't the nerve to forward them to Magnus.

He gets the letter about the dragon egg, and then there is nothing for months. He didn't mourn very much in public, of course, and it feels dissonant to channel grief for someone as industrious as James into anything so unproductive as reading old notes by lamplight. So he does his best to forget (once he frees the fairy mice, of course, and gets back into the wine cellar). There's plenty to do, after all, and it isn't until after Carentan, when he finds himself left sleepless by thoughts of the past and the messages it can't send, that he turns to the messages again.

At first they are as patternless as he first thought, left randomly around the Sanctuary for anyone to find. Except, he realizes, he's the only person who ever found them. They were always in places that he was first to look. James cannot predict the future, but Declan has to admit that there are few people who have ever known him better, and it's possible that James reasoned out where to put the letters so that Declan and Declan alone would find them.

There has to be a reason why. James did, on occasion, do things with no purpose behind them, but Declan didn't think that extended to actions after his own demise. There must be something else. So he goes back to poking in corners, picking places he thinks James might have guess he picked, and trying not to think too much about relative causality because he doesn't need the headache on top of everything else.

He gets his answer on a day when the world is coming apart at the seams. He finds the letter in James's sitting room, under his pipe in the box on the mantlepiece. Declan has been meaning to clean it out, but he hasn't yet because once he does he's not sure where he'll go to think. He doesn't know who keeps the dust cleared off of James's knick-knacks (though he has his suspicions), and he pretends not to notice that more and more of James's belongings seem to siphon themselves out of the room, taken by those who loved him as much as Declan had, though not always in the same way.

He's only meant to go in for a moment, just to collect his thoughts and figure out what he's going to do next. There isn't much he can accomplish here in London, but he's been on and off the phone with various government organizations all day, and that makes him feel he ought to be doing _some_thing. He just needs a moment to figure out what that is.

His phone vibrates as he reaches for the pipe box, not for any real reason, but just because the smell will remind him of quieter days. He flips the latch and his phone goes off again. By the time he's holding the pipe, by the time he sees the small, yellowed piece of paper in the bottom of the box, his phone is humming as new messages constantly fly in.

He checks the list. Henry, Whitehall, Will, Will, Will, something about plate tectonics and then Will again. He unfolds the paper as he selects Henry's message. Something about a volcano, but his attention is on the page, not the screen. _Helen will be back_, it says. _Don't let them panic_.

When Henry calls moments later, frantic, Declan is calm and collected.

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><p><strong>finis<strong>

**Note**: Thank you, Declan, for ensuring that James is going to be part of this story. *head desk*

Gravity_Not_Included, June 23, 2011


End file.
